Jordon joined Oct 17, 2011

Jordon McClain is the Founder and CEO of a small indie game company called Steel Cyclone Studios. While working full-time to support himself, Jordon is a self-taught Game Artist, Designer and Developer in his spare time. Jordon is creating several video games built upon his in-house engine known as the Cyclone Game Engine. The Cyclone Game Engine is a 2D/ 3D game engine built upon MonoGame and the XNA Framework to help make it easier and save time creating games. The game engine is not perfect by any means. The game engine is still in its infancy stages of development which is why its not available yet to the community. The Cyclone Game Engine is primarily built to serve the needs of Steel Cyclone Studios' game projects. Once it is further developed, Jordon plans on releasing it. Jordon's ultimate aim is to make it into the video game industry and join the greats of game designers. In the meantime, Jordon is trying to hone his skills and learn as much as possible.

Sure achievements are a great way to show off to your friends how good you are at games. However, there are more cheaters now than ever in games. Sure it’s OK to find Easter Eggs and some cheats that developers put in their games deliberately for fun but I’m not talking about that. For
example, in Rainbow Six Vegas, to get the 10 kills achievement, two of my friends set up a player match and each took turns setting up a player match and let each other kill each other 10 times. Don’t get me wrong, many people’s Gamerscores are legitimate, and you can’t fake beating Call of Duty 2 or 3 on Veteran difficulty. Nowadays more than ever, there are plenty of ways gamers up their Gamerscores more than ever. Achievements to me are simply a record of my accomplishments in games. Most of them I got unknowingly and yes sometimes I compete with my friends on unlocking achievements, but the real question is are some achievements really worth it? Your Gamerscore also depends on how manygames you have played or owned. It’s easy to brag about your Gamerscore being higher than somebody else’s when you have more games than they do. I don’t mean
a little amount, I mean a landslide.

I think the Xbox 360 achievement system is great. It has its pros and its cons. It’s great for single-player games. Achievements can also add hours to games in the RPG or Adventure genres, but that’s not my problem with Achievements. My problems with Achievements are in Multiplayer games. Now Gears of War is by far one of my most favorite games of all time, but there are so many achievement points to be gained from defeating opponents online with different weapons and in many different ways. I can’t stand getting points based on number of kills. Today, players are only getting better at killing in multiplayer games because the technology is so advanced now, that it’s capable of tracking your accuracy when you shoot and kill enemies. I've grown to not like multiplayer as much anymore today. Multiplayer games in my opinion are suppose to be about cooperation and teamwork, and having these sorts of objective like defeating opponents with different weapons and getting so many kills can break teams apart. I don’t know how many times I've been told not to pick up a certainweapon because a player was working on an Achievement, or being accused of stealing a kill when it was better for the team if I finish an enemy off. The bottom line is this: it’s achievements like this in games today that discourage teamwork and make the multiplayer experience nothing more than a number game. It’s even more disturbing today because gamers today playing these games are getting younger and younger every day. I don’t have too much of a problem with the age of the player as much as the individual themselves.

Instead of being rewarded for killing so many lives, why not be rewarded for saving and rescuing lives? Instead of the old 'run and gun', what if Achievements were also based on a matter of survival, making sacrifices, making choices, friendship, honor, and perseverance. I'll admit that Microsoft’s Achievement system isn't perfect, but it is impossible to deny that it is influencing the way we play games. Achievements need to have purpose, value and be worthwhile. I believe these types of achievements in games are will greatly help improve Microsoft’s Achievement system.

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